


Must Be Free

by vyatka



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Gen, No Plot/Plotless, Retail, this is catharsis for me ok
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-04-19
Updated: 2018-04-19
Packaged: 2019-04-25 03:00:30
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14369457
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vyatka/pseuds/vyatka
Summary: Bucky likes kids, unless they're pelting him with grapes. Particularly when their mother refuses to pay for the grapes. No matter how helplessly he insists.





	Must Be Free

James Barnes has bitten people before. It's one of the reasons the Soldier was muzzled - he has teeth, and no qualms about using them when it's practical. 

Or when it's impractical, but oh-so- _tempting._

Or when a woman with the biggest and blondest hair he's ever seen snaps her fingers in his face and says "Lemme give you something to do." 

Bucky, who currently doesn't lack for anything to do, and won't for about two hours, glances up at her, frowning. He sat down for a second - a second - and this blonde woman swept batlike from the ceiling with something she wants him to do for her. He knows her, he realizes. She's the same woman who tried to return an empty bread bag a few days ago. Her three screaming children are probably close behind. Bucky likes kids, unless they're pelting him with grapes. Particularly when their mother refuses to pay for the grapes. No matter how helplessly he insists. 

He gets to his feet, just in case they're in tow. 

"I picked out these apples," says the woman. "But I decided I don't want them." 

Bucky has an idea where this is going, and swallows a sigh. 

"Can you put them back?" 

The apples are less than fifty paces away. He catches the apples anyway when she drops them, unceremoniously expecting him to make do. 

"Sure thing, ma'am," he says. It was weeks before he fully worked himself out of being blunt to customers. It really does feel like  _he_ should be the authority figure, since he's the one who works here, but evidently the customer is king. Even when they're wrong, and have menacing children wielding grapes. 

"Oh," she adds. "I don't think your hair is very professional." 

He doesn't know what to say to that, so he just says "Yeah." 

She doesn't really look at him, which he's used to. 

 ***

Bucky has one work friend. She's in her late fifties, has the voice of a chainsmoker, and is covered in tattoos. Her name is Jo. She has a daughter that's about Bucky's age. His biological age, anyway. Her shithead of a husband left them both when the daughter - Kate - was ten. 

"Hi," she says. 

"Hi," he says back. 

 ***

An item won't scan. 

"Must be free." 

Bucky laughed at that, once. One time. Once. He hasn't laughed at any of the forty-three thousand times he's heard it since. It's not like his sense of humor is sophistocated, but come on. Even he has limits. 

An item misses a price tag. 

"Oh," says the guy, and Bucky could have said right along with him, in the exact same cadence and timbre, "it must be free!" 

"God, I want to die," mumbles the eighteen-year-old working at the next register. 

Bucky isn't a stranger to wanting to die. He knows the feeling intimately. He knows what it's like to curl around misery until it feels like it's seeped into your blood and taken you over, and maybe for that girl, this does feel like rock-misery. Not for Bucky. Because, although some of them might want to be, no one has been killed. The worst harm he's done is sneezed on someone's groceries. He was immediately yelled at, though. 

Bucky would take it. 

 ***

A customer attempts to return a shoe. Just one. By itself. With no receipt. 

"I can't proceed with this return," he tells him, patiently, and calls the manager to watch her tell him the same thing, verbatim.

It's funny. He chews his cheek, trying not to laugh. 

His knees and back don't ache at the end of eight-hour shifts, if only because he's stood for so much longer in the past. He is tired, and it's a good tired. It's a mundane, plain, nonviolent kind of exhaustion, which is what makes it good. 

"I'm sorry," he says, accidentally interfering with someone's cart. He gets a dirty look and later a complaint, but no response. 

 ***

He's happier than he's been in seventy years. 

**Author's Note:**

> LISTEN. Sometimes you just want to write some nonsense to make yourself feel better and that's it. And I'm trying to finish up and post everything I can before American Net Neutrality goes down. 
> 
> Please comment/kudos if you enjoyed this!


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